Maria Caulfield: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter) on securing the debate and on raising such an important issue. I answered another Monday Adjournment debate on dentistry recently, and on Thursday there will be another debate on it in Westminster Hall, so it is obviously a significant issue for many hon. Members across the House. I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Clacton (Giles Watling) and for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for raising issues on behalf of their constituents.
I am not going to stand here and say that there is not an issue around dentistry, because there absolutely is —it has been significantly affected by the pandemic. I will touch first on the short-term problems that the pandemic has created for dentistry and for patients, before going on to the longer-term problems around  the contract, which my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South raised and which have existed for a significant time.
A significant backlog has been created during covid. The majority of dental procedures are aerosol-generating, so covid creates a significant risk both for patients and for dental teams. When the lockdown measures initially came into force, only urgent dental procedures were allowed to go ahead. It was not until 8 June 2020 that non-urgent procedures were allowed, and only 20% of normal activity was allowed to go ahead at the time because of infection control measures. Even at that stage, we could see that a significant amount of work was backing up.
For most of last year, dental teams were allowed only up to 40% of normal activity. It was not until the end of last year that they could go up to 65%, and just around Christmas time that they were able to go up to 85% of normal activity. Even today, they are still not allowed to go back to 100% of normal activity, simply because infection control measures make it important that space, intervals between patients and cleaning between patients continue. Even with dentists working at pace and as hard as they can, a backlog is still accumulating nearly every day because those measures are in place.